“Glen strangled him, or knocked him down and suffocated him, or maybe just got the line around his neck and threw the spool over a beam and pulled him off the ground. It’s no wonder the line nearly took Goetz’s head off. Then he took a couple of shots at me just to slow me down, got his things together, and took off for Barbara Deane’s house to pick up his daughter.”
“Did you know all this when I went to your house, that first time?”
“I didn’t really know any of it. When I began spending more time on Mill Walk, I did a little checking into the ownership of Goetz’s house and lodge. One dummy company led to another dummy company, which was owned by Mill Walk Construction. Glen could have made it a lot more complicated, but he never thought anybody would bother to look even that closely. Once I knew that Goetz had worked for Glen, I began to think about Goetz bringing his meals home from the club, and telling Mrs. Truehart not to go into his guest room.”
“But you didn’t tell me about any doubts. You just told me about the case.”
“That’s right. I presented it to you exactly as it came to me.”
For a moment they looked at each other across the table, and then Tom smiled at the old man. Von Heilitz smiled back, and Tom laughed out loud. Von Heilitz’s smile broadened. “You handed it to me!”
“I did, I handed it to you. And you took it!”
“But you didn’t think I’d actually go to Eagle Lake.”
Von Heilitz shook his head. “I thought we’d have a few more peaceful conversations, and I’d let you know that Goetz worked for your grandfather, and things would go like that for a while.”
“Peaceful conversations, nothing,” Tom said. An astonishing bubble of hilarity broke free inside him; this laughter seemed to come from the same place as his tears, in the moonlit clearing when he had learned the answer to the puzzle of his childhood.
Von Heilitz kept smiling at him. “You turned out to be a little more talkative and energetic than I bargained on. And it almost got you killed. I’m glad you’re laughing.”
Tom leaned forward in his chair. “It’s hard to explain—but everything’s clear now. We sit here talking for twenty minutes, and all of a sudden I can see exactly what happened—it’s like points on a graph or something.”
“That’s right,” von Heilitz said. “Clarity is exhilarating.”
“The only thing we don’t know is why it all happened.” Tom leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands against his forehead, straining to capture some knowledge that seemed just out of sight—something else he knew without being able to see. “What were those notes about? What did Jeanine Thielman know he was?” He threw his arms out. “Maybe she knew that he killed his wife and faked her suicide. Maybe the newspaper editor was right.”
“Would she say, You have to be stopped—this has gone on too long?”
“Sure, she could,” Tom said.
“I saw Magda Upshaw’s body at the same time Sam Hamilton did, and what he thought were stab wounds were the marks of the hooks on the drag.”
“You think she killed herself.”
The old man nodded. “But I don’t know why she killed herself. Didn’t one of those notes say I know what you are? Maybe Magda found out what he was, and it was too much for her.”
“She found out he was a crook. Isn’t that what we’re saying? He was involved with dirty deals with Maxwell Redwing from the start—he was in Maxwell’s pocket, and Fulton Bishop was in his?”
“That’s what we’re saying, all right, though we’re talking about the days before Fulton Bishop.”
Some other knowledge flickered in and out of Tom’s sight. “Adultery? Younger women?” He groaned. “Actually, Barbara Deane told me that all he ever did with younger women was take them out, so that he could be seen with them.”
“Even if he did sleep with them, I don’t think that Jeanine would have gotten so excited about it. And is it a secret he’d kill to keep?”
“Not if he went out with them in public,” Tom admitted.
The old man crossed his legs and yanked his tie down. “We can use this secret of his without knowing what it is.”
“How?”
Von Heilitz stood up, and his knees cracked. He made a pained face. “We’ll talk about that after I shower and have a nap. There’s a little place to eat downstairs.” He bent forward and pushed the folded newspaper across the table. “In the meantime, take a look at this article.”
The Shadow stepped away from the table and stretched his long arms above his head. Tom scanned the short article, which was about the arrest of Jerome Hasek, Robert Wintergreen, and Nathan LaBarre, residents of Mill Walk, in Eagle Lake, Wisconsin on charges of housebreaking, burglary, and auto theft. Von Heilitz was looking at him with an overtone of concern that made him feel nervous.
“We already know this,” Tom said.
“And now everybody else knows it too. But there’s something else you have to know, though I hate to be the one to tell you. Read the last sentence.”
“ ‘The three men are assisting the Eagle Lake police in their investigations of other crimes.’ ” Tom looked up at von Heilitz.
“That little crime you solved is crucial to helping us with all the big ones.”
“Does this have to do with what you and Tim Truehart were talking about after I left the hospital? About the man who lives by himself in the woods? Who’s down on his luck?”
Von Heilitz unbuttoned his vest and leaned against the frame of the connecting door. “Why do you think your grandfather was in such a hurry to get you up north?”
“To get me off Mill Walk.”
“Tell me what were you doing when someone took a shot at you.”
“I was talking—” The physical sensations of the knowledge arrived before the knowledge itself. Tom’s throat constricted. He felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach.
Von Heilitz nodded, bowing his whole body so that his clothes flapped over his chest. He looked like a sorrowful scarecrow. “So I don’t have to tell you.”
“No,” Tom said. “That can’t be true. I’m his grandson.”
“Did he tell you to come back home? Did he even tell you to call the police?”
“Yeah. He did.” Tom shook his head. “No. He tried to talk me out of calling them. But after I called them, he told me it was a good idea.”
Tell me, what do you see when you look out the window, this time of night? I always liked nights up at Eagle Lake.
“Grand-Dad knew where the phone was,” Tom said. The boot was still in his stomach.
“He knew you’d have a light on. He wanted you framed in the window.”
“He even made me face forward—he asked me what I saw out the window—but at the last minute I bent to see through my reflection …”
“He had it set up,” von Heilitz said, in a voice that would have been consoling if he had been speaking different words. “The man Jerry hired knew when Glen was going to call.”
“I knew he killed those two people,” Tom said, unable to say their names, “but that was forty years ago. I guess I finally understood that he was mixed up in dirty stuff with Ralph Redwing. But I still thought of him as my grandfather.”
“Glen is your grandfather, worse luck,” von Heilitz said. “And he’s your mother’s father. But even when I knew him back in school, other people were never very real to him. They never have been.”
Tom stared down at the newspaper without seeing it.
“Do you know what I mean, that other people aren’t real to him?”
Tom nodded.
“It’s a special kind of mind—it’s a sickness. Nobody can change people like that, nobody can help them.” He moved into the room. “Will you be all right for an hour or so?”